


All of These New Days

by omiceti



Category: Law & Order: SVU
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-03-15
Updated: 2012-03-15
Packaged: 2017-11-01 23:26:27
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,658
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/362451
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/omiceti/pseuds/omiceti
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>After two years in the Congo, Alex wonders whether it might be time to go home, wherever that is.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All of These New Days

Alex steps into the blessed air conditioning of the tiny storefront office and brushes the dust of the street from her pants. This is the first time she’s left the group house in a week, and she’s only a little bit dizzy. Her head hurts from the sun, but she’s pretty sure she isn’t going to vomit again. She’s pleased with herself.  
  
She pulls the glass door shut behind her, lets her eyes adjust to the dim interior. “The boss wants to see you,” Sophia tells her, standing up from her rickety desk. She looks Alex over, presses a lukewarm bottle of water into her hands. The fridge must be on the fritz again. “You look okay, yes? Feeling better?”  
  
“Just about, thanks,” Alex says. “Is he in his office?”  
  
“As always,” Sophia says, which is true - Philippe almost never leaves the office, and Alex suspects he may sleep there.  
  
He’s a kindly older man, a weary-eyed Belgian human rights prosecutor who wears his sleeves rolled up. They’ve been working together nearly two years, but all Alex knows about him is that he used to have a family, but doesn’t anymore, and that he’s been in Africa for years. He frowns at her with concern as she slides into the ratty chair opposite his desk. “How are you doing?”  
  
She shrugs. “I’m okay. It seems to get a little harder to recover each time.”  
  
He nods. “That’s normal.”  
  
*  
  
The first time, she’d been in country only a few weeks, and although they had all been warned, it seemed silly to keep wearing terrible-smelling and probably carcinogenic insect repellent when she was only going to meetings all day, maybe out with some of her new colleagues for a couple of the sludgy local Primus beers at a sidewalk cafe on the way home. About a dozen of them lived in a sprawling group house on a nice street in the Gombe district, with hammocks and a big garden. There was a woman named Chantal who was paid to cook for all of them and to do the shopping, and some additional part-time domestic staff to clean the house and do the laundry, and so aside from the job, there really wasn’t much to do.  
  
She’d woken from a troubled sleep, unaware of the time or even where she was, with a thick fog of pain filling her skull, and a feeling like pins were sticking in all her joints. As she twisted over in the soaked sheets, the pain shot out from her joints and settled into her limbs in a terrible burning ache, as though each bone were being squeezed by a malevolent hand.  
  
The pain was breathtaking, blocking all other thought and sensation until Alex became vaguely aware of a low moan, which she guessed was herself, and then an overwhelming wave of nausea that propelled her, just in time, into the bathroom she shared with a French aid worker named Emanuelle. She crawled back into bed and spent the rest of the night slipping in and out of an oppressive, fearful half-sleep, unable to think about anything but how uncomfortable she was and the thought that had settled somewhere at the base of her skull, right under the worst part of the headache:  am I dying?  
  
In the morning, when there was some light, Alex was actually vaguely surprised that she was still alive. Nothing short of imminent death seemed as though it could hurt so much. Her head felt like it was going to come off.  
  
Chantal found her after Alex missed breakfast. She took a long look at Alex tangled in her scratchy sheets, at the angry, prickly rash covering her arms and torso, shook her head, and said, “Dengue.”  
  
“Oh,” Alex whispered, relieved that it had a name now, and even more relieved that it wasn’t malaria. She’d done plenty of reading about dengue before her arrival, and she knew it usually wasn’t fatal, so at least that.  
  
“I will call for a doctor,” said Chantal, and brought her a thick, horrid-tasting watery glass of something, salted and cloudy, and she choked on it when she tried to swallow. “Do your best,” Chantal told her, somewhat unsympathetically, Alex thought, dimly indignant. “It will help you.”  
  
Dr. Mwanga from the clinic arrived after a few minutes, or a few hours, of feverish tossing and turning. Alex hadn’t been sick since she’d had the flu in 2006, and she’d forgotten how awful it was. He was a huge man, built like a lumberjack, but his hands were sure and careful as he examined her, took her temperature. “I trained for several years at Massachusetts General,” he told her in gently accented English, and Alex wondered whether he knew her cousin, a cardiologist or something. She was too uncomfortable to remember, and anyway, Boston was another world.  
  
He shrugged, finally. “It is dengue for sure,” he said. “You can come to the clinic and we can give you an IV if you would like, but your fever is not so high, so it will not be necessary as long as you stay hydrated.” He examined the remains of the foul-tasting slurry. “Is this the grain water from breakfast?”  
  
Chantal, who had been standing in the corner throughout, said, “Yes, with salt and some sugar. She can stay here. I have had it a few times, I know what to do.”  
  
The doctor grinned, then, satisfied. “It looks like you are in good hands then, Miss Cabot,” he said. To Chantal, he said, “You know if you will need to call me back, then,” and she nodded, and the next week was a haze of illness.  
  
After that, she wore repellent.  
  
*  
  
It doesn’t always work that well, though, and each time she gets dengue, jolting out of fitful sleep with the dreaded rash settled over her like an angry sheet, it takes her longer to recover, feels harder to shake off. She’s sweating in the cool air.  
  
Philippe leans forward, tents his hands over the small free space on his cracked laminate desk. “There’s a conference next week in Pointe-Noire,” he tells her. “I’d like to send you.”  
  
“All right,” she says. “But why me?”  
  
He shrugs. “I have a meeting with the justice minister on Tuesday, so I can’t go. You can answer any questions about our progress. I expect there will be some.”  
  
She nods slowly. “What’s the conference about?”  
  
Philippe glances back at the screen of his ancient computer, which like all the others in the office is running Windows 98. “Sharing lessons learned in human rights work,” he says, pulls out a cigarette and lights it. She watches the brief flame, the twist of smoke spiraling up toward the chipped acoustic tile.  
  
“I don’t even know what that means, Philippe.”  
  
He grins. “It’s a USAID conference. Neither does anyone else.” Aid agencies are very fond of “lessons learned,” she knows, and also very fond of conferences, which provide a valuable opportunity to distribute tastefully branded pens and T-shirts. She probably has enough conference freebies to open up her own USAID surplus store.  _From the American people!_  
  
His expression becomes more serious. “And it is also a good opportunity to think about what you would like to do about your contract.”  
  
Right. She’s actually almost forgotten she’s been here two years. Time flies.  
  
“I’ll give you an answer next week,” she says.  
  
He nods. “I hope we won’t lose you. But you need to make the decision you are most comfortable with, yes? I’ve already asked Sophia to book your flight.”  
  
Well. It won’t take her long to pack, anyway. Everything she owns in the Congo fits into an army-surplus duffel bag, which she never quite unpacks, because the thing about this place is that you never know when you’ll have to run.  
  
*  
  
Once a month, at least, there was a big cocktail party for all the expats in Kinshasa, usually at the Belgian or Swiss embassies or at the extravagant Mont Fleury villas rented by chiefs of mission for the various aid agencies, NGOs, and multilateral entities of vague extraction. Shiny white Toyota 4x4s crowded the dusty streets in little flotillas, and in expansive gardens and big gilded rooms decorated in an ostentatious, faux-nativist style Alex had begun to think of as Mobuto Chic, large uniformed contingents of smiling, silent Congolese staff made the rounds with mixed drinks. (No matter how fancy, all the air-conditioned buildings in Kinshasa smelled the same: black mold, feet, an overpowering off-brand Kuwaiti disinfectant.) The aid workers stood around in linen pants and expensive sandals, getting drunker than would generally be advisable among colleagues back home and trying to outdo one another’s experiences in the bush.  
  
She supposed she’d been naive to be surprised by it, but it was an ugly spectacle. No one else seemed to notice. Still, the parties had to be endured, since they were the focus of expatriate life, and it was bad form not to show up. Even here, especially here, the political game went on, and it had to be played. She knew she’d been stupid to hope she could ever outrun it.   
  
Another drink, then. Maybe she could drown the whole sorry business, or at least her annoyance, in some top-shelf gin. Alex had been feeling vaguely unwell since her arrival in Kinshasa, and maybe it would help. She’d discovered quickly, too, that the general lack of consistent refrigeration made the imported wines a bad idea.  
  
A dark-haired woman reached over her at the table for a Primus, and smirked. “I saw you back there with the Peace Corps types,” she said, and Alex turned to her, startled.  
  
“Did you get a little tired of this month’s installment of Terror in the Jungle?” she asked, and Alex laughed. The sound of it surprised her. It had been a while, she realized.   
  
“Jeanne,” the other woman said, and extended her hand, her accent thoroughly Midwestern. Alex felt an odd stab of nostalgia. How strange, to be thinking of the Midwest as home. “I work with USAID. Agroforestry specialist.”  
  
Alex didn’t know what “agroforestry” even meant, but she did know that agriculture jobs, on account of the fact that they were essentially inconspicuous and also required a lot of time in the field, were popular covers for people whose actual work was somewhat less public. Jeanne, who somehow gave the distinct impression that she was the sort of person you’d want on your team in a firefight, certainly looked the part.  
  
“Alex,” she said, and shook the other woman’s hand. “I’m with one of the human rights NGOs.”  
  
“Yeah?” Jeanne asked, glancing down briefly as she popped the cap off her beer. “What do you do?”  
  
“Oral testimony collection, mostly,” Alex said. “Evidence. ICC. That sort of thing.”  
  
Jeanne’s eyes remained locked on hers, and Alex found herself flushing. “Interesting,” Jeanne said. “Probably some work on Ituri, I guess?” At Alex’s nod, she continued, “You must be new in town; I haven’t seen you at one of these horrible things before. How’d you end up here?”  
  
“I took a couple of years’ leave from the Manhattan district attorney’s office,” Alex said, and Jeanne raised an eyebrow. “I’m a prosecutor, actually. Sex crimes. So I figured it wouldn’t be too different.”  
  
“And?”  
  
“It is.”  
  
Jeanne laughed, but her smile stopped short of her eyes. “Yeah,” she agreed, surveying the crowd. There were plenty of other expats at the party, too, people who didn’t work on aid or development or human rights, people with expensive watches and good sunglasses. People whose friends and drinking habits and business dealings might interest the sort of agroforestry specialist Alex suspected Jeanne might be. “I would imagine so.”  
  
“On the bright side,” Alex said, grateful for the faintly medicinal-tasting wash of gin in her mouth, “I did lose an old bet with myself.”  
  
“What was that?”  
  
“That I’d never find a party less enjoyable than a Bar Association cocktail hour.”  
  
Jeanne’s laugh was genuine, that time.  
  
*  
  
Pointe Noire’s airport serves international flights, so she’d expected a fence. When she disembarks from the flight from Brazzaville into the usual sweaty chaos of the arrivals area, she’s surprised by the people walking along the tarmac on their way to work or the market, and by the goats wandering in the parking lot. But it’s a pretty nice town, she thinks, in a little Yugo taxi on the way to the hotel the young American embassy attaché had recommended. Certainly much nicer than Kinshasa. The streets are dusty, but mostly paved, and although the air carries the familiar metropolitan bouquet – rotting garbage, diesel exhaust, raw sewage, the faint sweetness of decomp, and floating over it all the acrid sting of burning plastic – she can actually smell the sea.  
  
The hotel is, of course, ridiculous. There are chandeliers, real ones, and air conditioning and balconies. In marshy, snake-infested forest, after eight hours of painful, mucky slog through dangling vines – as a reward for her efforts, two nights tossing and turning under bed nets in a thatched hut, trying not to scratch the fly bites on her legs, trying not to remember the words trapped on evidence tapes in her bag – it was easy to forget that things like air conditioning existed in the world, or that people with money would choose to spend it on chandeliers.  
  
The Lebanese desk clerk fiddles with her passport, and through the glass-backed wall of the hotel she can see a really nice-looking pool and some pleasant greenery. It doesn’t help much, she knows, and it won’t. All she can really think about these days are the eyes of the women in the villages and the camps, the ones too scarred ever to have children or even to urinate without the acid sting to remind them of the day the child soldiers had arrived. She hasn’t slept through the night since their in-country orientation.    
  
The rent-a-shrink in Kinshasa calls it secondary post-traumatic stress, and she can kind of see it, actually, how this sort of thing could turn you into a lunatic. It’s why her contract was arranged for two years, why she has to think about renewing it, just as SVU back home was supposed to rotate its detectives out after two years. As though the number had some kind of protective power, as though with the proper temperament and good training, you could endure the worst of human nature for exactly twenty-four months, but not a day longer.  
  
But no one could do this and just – just forget about it. One week would probably do it, let alone years. She’d have to ask Olivia about it sometime: how much of this sort of thing you could take before you turned into her.  
  
Olivia couldn’t have done this, actually, Alex thinks, looking at a model airplane in Air France livery sitting on the marble desk. A gift from a flight crew, probably. She’d talked a good game, but in many ways, Olivia had never really been strong.  
  
“Your key,” the receptionist says finally, and she says  _merci_ reflexively, tries to smile.

 

*

  
Once, in Kisangani, she’d felt suddenly tired over dinner at one of the tin-roofed, open-walled sidewalk joints that could be called “restaurants” only in the sense that they had hot food for sale. She could feel herself drooping over the rice, and was struck with the fear that it might be the onset of something more than simple exhaustion. She’d had some headaches lately; maybe it was dengue again, or God knew what else. She was always feeling a little ill, and it was hard to take note of these things: was the headache a result of that goddamn disinfectant that seemed to follow her everywhere, like a toxic, ineffective cloud, or did it mean that she was missing some vitamin, or was it an early symptom of meningitis? Was that rumbling cramp the beginning of her period, or the onset of dysentery? Was the pain in her joints nothing to worry about, or did it signal sleeping sickness? It was impossible to know, and it kept her on edge.   
  
In any case, she needed to get to bed. “I’ll see you tomorrow,” she told her colleagues and some of the local police who’d attended their training session, rising from the cheap plastic chair. She left a few hundred francs on the long table. “This should cover me.”   
  
Jacques, who had grown up in Kisangani and liked to call himself Miracle Man, having lost exactly half of his left ear to a bullet in the crossfire between Ugandan and Rwandan troops a few years back, looked at her with concern. “Are you okay?” he asked.    
  
She tried to smile. “Just tired,” she said. The hotel where they were all staying was only a five-minute, reasonably well-lit and well-populated walk, right past the MONUC barracks, so it was fine. “I’ll meet you at seven tomorrow.”   
  
He nodded, and she tried to steady herself as she walked out into the street. It was dusty, and here in the market, it smelled particularly strongly of rotting garbage. Her head spun for a moment.   
  
She set her jaw. One foot in front of the other; it wasn’t so hard. _Get with it, Cabot._ Still, she had to pause at an alley next to the barracks, and she leaned over for a moment, trying to get some blood back to her head.    
  
Something glimmered in the alley.   
  
She squinted. It was brassy, maybe, like the bangles some of the women wore, but why was it on the ground? Suddenly her vision resolved, and the shapes in the alley revealed themselves as the arm of a woman, lying in the filth.   
  
Alex approached carefully. Her head was suddenly clear, and it was a little unfortunate, because the sweet familiar reek of death assaulted her before she was even all that close to the woman. She was in a short dress, her hair wrapped up in cloth, arms flung out, face turned up to the sky, her unseeing eyes wide open.   
  
She was young. Early twenties, maybe. Even in the dim light, Alex could see the angry ring of bruises around her neck, the soft spot where a thumb had pressed into her throat. She turned - it was barely a surprise, anymore, a body in the street - and walked back to the restaurant.   
  
The sergeant of the little group of police who had been eating with them was a tall, imperially slender Logo woman with killer cheekbones. Alex thought idly that in other circumstances, she’d already have made a small fortune modeling. They all followed her back to the alley, and the sergeant knelt to examine the body.   
  
Her face was tight as she stood. “This is militia work,” she said tersely.    
  
Alex looked behind her at the dead woman, still splayed open on the ground. Something about the arms was bothering her. “How can you be sure?” she asked, and then she knew what it was: the familiar abrasion pattern on her wrists. Ligature marks. Or maybe - bruises? It was hard to tell whether they had been made by ropes or by, by handcuffs, maybe. In the past, she’d been lucky enough only to have to see them in photographs.   
  
A wave of dizziness washed over her, and she closed her eyes briefly. In that moment, she was back on Delancey, peering over Olivia’s shoulder, her white latex gloves and the pulsing vein in her temple, the resigned set of her mouth, Elliot’s voice drifting over from an interview with a witness, watching Warner tilt the dead woman’s head left and right as she felt gently for a cause of death.   
  
She opened her eyes and was back in Africa, in Kisangani, a strange back alley in a strange city with police who had no gloves, let alone medical examiners or crime labs. Still. If this had been a militia, why would they have tied her wrists? They hunted in packs, in brigades. Why only one woman, why strangled instead of hacked, why hidden back here in this alley next to -    
  
Oh. She looked at the sergeant, who was watching her closely, her eyes hard. “The work of a militia,” she repeated, and Alex thought of a conversation she had had with Philippe, her first week in Kinshasa, saying delicately, “If you ever encounter any...irregularities with MONUC. Keep it to yourself. I must stress this very highly.”   
  
He’d regarded her very seriously over the tops of his glasses, suddenly looking old and extremely tired. “Of all the ways to get yourself killed in the field,” he told her quietly, “that is the easiest.”    
  
One of the sergeant’s men closed the woman’s eyes. They wrapped her up and carried her body out to the street, where a police truck was waiting for them. Alex stared at the logos on its door. _From the American people!_   
  
The sergeant turned to her before she hoisted herself up into the shotgun seat. “We will try to find her family,” she said, and her eyes were sad now. “But it is best if you leave it with us. Please.”   
  
“Does this sort of thing - happen a lot?” Alex asked, afraid to know what she was actually asking.    
  
The sergeant pressed her lips together. “It happens,” she said. “It happens.”   
  
Alex and her sobered colleagues walked the remaining couple of blocks to their hotel together. She tried to ignore the MONUC compound, suddenly sinister behind its high walls.   
  
That night, head pounding, she threw up twice. As usual, she wasn’t entirely sure why.   
  
*   
  
Although the hotel is the fanciest in Pointe Noire, only one of its elevators works, so she takes the stairs, sick of waiting, sick of everything. The stairwell has marble steps, but smells familiarly of piss. If she closed her eyes, she could be back in the 1-6 before its renovation.   
  
She hasn’t forgotten New York, exactly. It’s just that remembering is a serious mental exercise, requiring her to concentrate beyond remembering what it was like to walk on a smoothly paved sidewalk, to pull together the full spectrum of sensory memories: The squawking of car horns outside the courthouse as she inhaled the sugary spices of the roasted nut vendors; the glow of the early morning sun off high windows as she hurried into Hogan Place in the morning, the sound of pigeons’ wings slapping the air as she startled a flock into flight with her passing, watching her breath fog around her in the cold. Melting chocolate – she hadn’t tasted chocolate in years – on her tongue as hands slid up her calves, caressing. Silvered light glossing Olivia’s cheekbones in the small hours as Alex struggled to keep her eyes open, the rueful rasp of her sleep-heavy voice, murmuring, “Don’t worry, Alex, I’ll be fine, I’ll see you in court,” the sharp catch of the metal as she slammed a clip into her gun.   
  
*   
  
Olivia had wandered into her office while she was packing it up, and then stopped short in the doorway, like someone had punched her.   
  
“It’s true, then,” she said, looking around at the mostly-bare walls. “You’re really doing it.”   
  
Alex had straightened up from a box of McKinney’s she wouldn’t need for a while, wincing at her knees, which were protesting rather more than they once had. Had Olivia thought she was…threatening to leave? That she wasn’t serious? “I’m flying to Geneva Thursday afternoon. Then it’s two years in the Congo. Option to extend.”   
  
Olivia smiled a little sadly, spread her hands. “Eventually you always leave,” she said, and Alex could hear her fighting to keep the bitterness out of her voice. “You’ll...be missed.”   
  
_ Not by you _ , Alex wanted to say, or at least to point out that Olivia was using the passive voice - a sure sign of something else she wanted to say, it always had been - but instead, unsmilingly, she said, “Sure.”   
  
Olivia hesitated. “Well - do you have any plants you need to have looked after? Or anything?”   
  
Alex stared at her. “Uh. Yes, actually. It’s a cactus.”   
  
Olivia smirked. “Gift from Jack McCoy?”   
  
“Donnelly,” Alex corrected, and Olivia’s smirk widened. “It’s a really spiky little thing. As one might expect. I’d been planning to let it die. But I suppose it would be nicer. Not to.”   
  
Olivia’s expression softened. “Why don’t I come get it on Thursday? Day off,” she explained, self-consciously. “I have a windowsill it could live in. I could actually take you to JFK from there, if it would – make things easier for you.”   
  
Alex frowned. They didn’t exactly have a mutual-favors sort of relationship, not anymore, and she’d been planning to order a car. But Olivia was obviously making an effort, and it was nice. It was really nice, actually.   
  
She smiled. “That would be great. Thank you, Olivia.”   
  
Olivia closed her eyes for a moment. “Alex,” she said finally, as though exhaling a long-held breath. “Any time.”   
  
It wasn’t exactly true, though.   
  
*   
  
It’s a nice room, actually, with a lovely view of the pool and the roofs of the better houses built for Chinese and French oil workers and, beyond those, the small harbor with its container docks. Like all air-conditioned rooms here, it feels a little damp. In the wavering mirror over the bureau she can see the sunken reflection of her eyes, and looks herself over critically. Her last round with the fever is showing on her face, and her cheekbones look uncomfortably prominent.   
  
She hangs her only suit – white linen – in the small closet, unwinds her scarf. It’s the most useful thing she owns here, a large, plain square of khaki-colored woven cotton she regularly douses in permethrin. Good for keeping the bugs off your neck, covering your hair in one of the trickier villages, keeping you a little warmer when night falls, chilly in the highlands and grasping at exposed skin. In a pinch her scarf has been a bag, a bandage, a tourniquet. Along with her Lariam, her insect repellent, her water-purification tablets, an extra pair of socks, and her UN-issue copy of _Where There Is No Doctor_ with its flow charts for diagnosing causes of diarrhea, a scarf is one of the only things she never travels without.   
  
*   
  
_ Hemorrhage,  _ Alex thought, looking at the unnaturally large bruises blooming over the kid’s chest, but of course she wasn’t a doctor and there wasn’t really anything she could do. Blood rimmed his nose, his eyes, his ears. It was probably one of the viruses that lurked in monkeys or livestock around the villages. She had heard of Ebola, of course, but she’d been reminded of these things at the UN compound in Goma, where the tired-looking public health attaché had shaken his head. “The only good thing to say about these is that they are a bit rare in most places,” he’d told her, with a strong Dutch accent, listing an array of unpleasant-sounding viruses: Rift Valley, Congo-Crimea hemorrhagic, Lassa, Marburg, Duvenhage, Mokola, “and a number we have not identified yet.”   
  
She’d looked over his shoulder, at the razor wire topping the eight-foot walls – the UN thought the walls sent the wrong message, but had eventually acknowledged that the country staff were at serious risk out here and agreed to maintain them – rubbed her stiff shoulder absently, thought, _great_.   
  
“Help us!” the boy’s aunt demanded, panicking. His name was Joseph, she thought. Maybe Jacob. No, it was Joseph. All she really remembered about him, aside from the dying, and a terrible wet rattling sound, was a strange birthmark on his left arm, which almost perfectly resembled a gavel. She’d thought to mention it to his mother, when she first met him, but then she’d realized no one in the village had likely ever seen a gavel.   
  
He got sick the night she arrived, and he was clearly dying by the next afternoon. She’d wanted to help, but she couldn’t. _Where There Is No Doctor_ provided very little help on the subject of viral hemorrhagic fevers. If that was even causing it. She didn’t know. Snakebites could end like this, too, she’d learned, from a young mother in another district. There was just a lot of blood.   
  
She tried to use her scarf as a tourniquet, sort of, but it didn’t help. She’d figured it wouldn’t, that the boy would have only a slim chance even at a really good hospital, maybe one of the screened centers in Kinshasa with backup generators, but it would take a week to get him there by boat and truck, and he was fading fast. The terrain made helicopters risky and anyway, who would bother for a village three-year-old? He was one death among many, among millions. There was nothing to be done.   
  
Alex sat with the boy’s mother while the bleeding ebbed and flowed, and did not flinch from the rodents that scuffled in corners, tried to block her memories of the Dutch doctor, saying _many of these illnesses are spread by small mammals, rats._ She’d gathered her testimony – which was her job, of course – about what had happened on the night of Joseph’s conception, and she’d kept her voice very steady as she asked _how many?_ and _who was their commander?_ and _what else do you remember?_   
  
She couldn’t very well ask for her scarf back, either, after the disease – whichever one it was – had run its inevitable course, so Sophie buried her son wrapped in the scrap of fabric Alex had bought in Brazzaville. Flies buzzed around the body. Alex stayed for the funeral, of course, which involved much singing in a language she couldn’t understand, and when they lowered his small body into the ground she hadn’t been able to feel much of anything at all.   
  
*   
  
From her balcony, Alex drinks bottled water and watches a tugboat push a massive container ship out into the harbor, piled high with blood diamonds and illegal timber and conflict minerals and maybe one or two containers full of frightened women for good measure, perhaps headed to the girlie windows of Geneva or Amsterdam to tempt bankers bored of the pale slips of women shipped in from Ukraine and Belarus. She’d seen them during her training, dull-eyed and dressed up like dolls in the Cornavin district near the train station, the reek of cheap red wine and roasted lamb soaking into her hair.   
  
The ship turns, slowly, and lumbers out to sea. Good luck, Alex thinks, but she knows no amount of magical thinking, however fervently wished, works out here.   
  
To her left the waning sun shines on the water. To her right, a few stories down, the Air France captain swims laps in the hotel pool. She’s seen him a few times already, polite in the elevator, a trim, carefully muscled form, always swimming laps. Not much else to do here for a pilot, really. Flying and swimming: maybe not such a bad life, she thinks. You could go everywhere, but you’d never really have to be anywhere.   
  
He has good form, at least. Alex has a swimsuit with her, useful under clothes during canoe rides or overcrowded ferry crossings, just in case. A swim might be nice, she thinks, and then she thinks about men seeing her in like that, vulnerable in the water. The slow roll of nausea begins in her stomach, and she shudders.   
  
Alex knows she will probably never be normal again. They’d warned her about that, during training in Geneva. It will change you, they said, and she’d nodded along, looked serious, said _yes of course_ , because how much worse could it be than SVU, really?   
  
She watches him swim, one arm over another. It’s vaguely relaxing. She’d had absolutely no idea.   
  
The ship is already a pale gray smudge on the horizon. Dusk is falling, and she’s beginning to hear the small, fatal whine of the mosquitoes. Malaria’s favorite time of day. Time to get inside. Because the truth is, everything is trying to kill her. The drifting, fatal laze of mosquitoes, tsetse flies, even the way the Lariam gives her nightmares. Vivid dreams, said the doctor in Geneva, writing her a prescription. Still better than malaria, though. Don’t stop taking it.   
  
Nightmares, Alex had asked, is that what you mean by vivid dreams?   
  
The doctor had nodded. Yes, he’d said. You should expect nightmares.   
  
*   
  
Actually, it was work that a junior investigator or some kind of 2L summer intern would be doing back home; collecting oral testimony from the survivors of the many and varied horrors visited upon women in the Congo statutorily required the services of a credentialed attorney, but it was not really complicated work. It was good to be doing this, though, the scut work, close to the problem and the trauma, and far from the corridors of power where all of it would be words on a page, stripped of the charred smells and the rot of bone and the clamor of death, collated, typed up, charges reduced or dropped for lack of evidence or political expediency. Undone.   
  
She’d been really good at that part of it – the politicking, the compromising – when she’d first started. But things were different now. Maybe it was her own experience, her only real experience, of being powerless, a victim, dependent on other people to help her find some kind of relief: some contingent, slippery sense of justice, whatever the word _justice_ actually meant. She’d been growing increasingly frustrated, buried in the mechanics of the law in Albany and then thrust back into the merciless, churning shark tank of the DA’s office, the undisguised ambition of the lawyers fighting over scraps of chances at promotions.   
  
It didn’t seem worth what she’d given up to get there, anymore. So, she thought, on her second day in Kinshasa, at least this was work finally worth doing.   
  
And maybe - she tries to ignore this part - she'd just wanted to prove that she would do the hard things for other people, too. That it didn't take a fear for her life to make her brave.   
  
That part didn’t sound as good in her own mind, but that was one thing about being in the Congo: it was so easy to make it all up. You could be anything you liked, anything at all, everything for sale, everything up for grabs.    
  
*   
  
She needs cash, so after she's freshened up a little she asks at the front desk, and the clerk directs her to an ATM that only dispenses euros. “After that you can change it to francs at the café across the street,” he says, and _of course I can_ , she thinks, but thanks him anyway.   
  
The street is dusty. But there are sidewalks, which is a pleasant surprise, and they’re even paved, and the ATM even works, so all in all, it’s pretty impressive. She crosses the street to the café, called La Citronelle. Inside, it’s air-conditioned and there are huge counters displaying all manner of pastries – éclairs, doughnuts, coconut cakes, fruit tarts, chocolate mousses, macarons, croissants, a little parcel of Europe in a confectioner’s case. It’s one of the strangest things she’s seen since she’s arrived.   
  
She orders an espresso and a slice of cake, both very rare treats, and changes her euros with the cashier at an unsurprisingly usurious rate. The air conditioning inside is actually too cold, so she goes out to the covered porch, where ceiling fans circle lazily to keep the bugs off.   
  
It’s possible that her palate has become somewhat less discriminating on her steady diet of rice, fish, plantains, and food poisoning, but she’s pretty sure that the espresso is actually really quite good, and the cake is equally delicious, and she can just sit out on the street and watch people pass. It’s wonderful, actually, in the shaded coolness of the cafe’s terrace. There’s a small artisans’ market down the street, and she can see the riotous colors of the paintings and weavings on display. A pet cocker spaniel, one of the only dogs she’s seen here, pants quietly under the next table.   
  
Across the street is the hotel shopping arcade, and from here she can see the shoe store on the second floor: Benson’s. Naturally.   
  
It doesn’t mean anything, Alex tells herself, of course, but  she’s not sure she’s convinced.

 

*

Bunia was a large, deadly city in the northeast, near the Ugandan border. Before the war, Alex heard, it had been a nice enough place, a market town, and then it had gone up in the conflagration of Ituri. “The war,” of course, was kind of a meaningless expression, because it was actually several dozen smaller conflicts and reciprocal ethnic cleansings, funded by mining profits, and all rolled up together into a long, convulsive agony of violence as Uganda and Rwanda fought a proxy war with each other. Trying to keep track of who hated whom, and why, was necessary but complicated. Over it all, the unburied memory of the Rwandan genocide stretched its long, malevolent shadow.   
  
They were there to interview survivors in some of the outlying villages about a long stretch of war crimes: rapes, maimings, murders, massacres, leveled hospitals, razed towns, salted fields, mass graves. The scope of the destruction was biblical. They were bunking at the UN compound, at Philippe’s insistence. “It has only recently even become possible to do this work there,” he’d told her back in Kinshasa. “You should have seen it before the peacekeeping mission deployed. Be careful.” There was a big MONUC detachment to provide security in Bunia, standing around with guns they were prohibited from firing.   
  
In the evening, after they arrived from Goma in a rattling old chartered Tupolev that moaned in protest at takeoff, she bought some snacks at the little canteen on base, and a Coke. She drank a lot of Coke. In glass bottles, it was much safer than sachets of water. There was a bench outside the canteen, facing the main yard of the base with its whitewashed buildings and twisty little trees.   
  
The bench shook a little as she opened a packet of chips – dinner for one – and she looked over to see a tired-looking man in fatigues, maybe mid-forties, blue beret, as he sat down beside her.   
  
He reached over, extended a hand. “Gustavo,” he said. “With the Uruguay mission.”   
  
“Alex,” she said, and told him who she was.   
  
“The ICC, finally, huh? Good,” he said a little savagely. “I hope you get these bastards.”   
  
“Which ones?”   
  
“All of them.” He lights a cigarette, takes a drag. “The work you’re doing, a couple of years ago, no way. Fighting in the streets, thousands of people coming here to the compound with everything they could carry. You could forget about leaving the city, you’d be shot right away.”   
  
He looked up at the cloudless sky. “Much better now,” he said. “Still horrible, but better. And we can’t do much, really.”   
  
Nobody could, of course, and Alex was about to say that, when he continued, rhetorically, “Since we are not allowed to shoot children.”   
  
It was a hard place, worse than anyplace she’d ever been to or, really, could ever have imagined. In practical terms it was in the middle of an active war zone, whatever the technicalities of the conflict might be, and its inhabitants were accordingly tense, gun-toting, and suspicious. Alex had never felt more vulnerable.   
  
The next morning, Alex climbed into the white 4X4 with her colleague Sophia, a law student who was there to translate from Lingala to French, and their driver Neye, who tucked a Russian-made pistol into the waistband of his pants for the occasion. The unpaved road out of Bunia was bone-shakingly rutted, scarred like the countryside, and it took them nearly three hours to crawl a few menacing miles to the village hall where one of the local NGOs had arranged a series of interviews.   
  
It was worse than usual, actually. Alex’s recorders captured the partial accounts, in halting voices, of what had happened, a litany of horrors so constant and profound that it was actually difficult for many of the survivors to remember which church bombing she was asking about, or the particular mass grave she needed to place on her map, or whose troops had raped them which time.   
  
They broke at lunch for a meal of fufu and some dried freshwater fish with another glass-bottled Coke. “They would like to show you the grave,” Sophia told her finally, gesturing to a group of the older women. There were not many men in the village, in any of the villages.   
  
“Of course,” Alex said.   
  
It was just a small hill covered in wildflowers, next to the church. The church had no roof anymore, only crumbling walls and exposed, skeletal beams, a bleached ribcage staring at the sky. They walked around the hill in a little group, a few curious children trailing them. Alex had read the reports of the Belgian university team that had visited the year prior with ground-penetrating radar, so she knew there were precisely 93 bodies under the little hill and its well-fertilized veil of flowers. At least it was harder to hide than it had once been. At least that.   
  
She wished she could walk without stepping on the sorrow dust of the ground.    
  
In the late afternoon, she heard – or maybe just felt – a low roll of thunder from far off in the hills. Clouds had begun to nestle in the gentle valleys among them, and it smelled vaguely of rain. Neye insisted they pack up immediately; night fell quickly at the equator, and the faint promise of stormy weather on the unsealed road was making him more nervous than usual. By 4:00 they were arranged back in the lumbering, logoed 4X4.   
  
The country was beautiful, green and lovely, with goats nosing around small farms, brightly dressed women hauling water or pounding fufu outside their small houses. No men, as usual. Beyond the most heavily-traveled trails that crossed the countryside, Alex knew, the land was mined.   
  
About an hour after they started, the 4X4 navigated an overgrown section of road, with scrubby trees and tangled underbrush sprouting up at the margins, cutting off the view. There was a sudden rumbling behind them, and Alex turned in her seat to see a blue truck behind them on the road, in the distance but closing quickly. Too quickly. Something was going wrong. She thought of the evidence tapes in her bag, acutely aware that they were worth killing for. Well. People died for much, much less.   
  
“Neye,” she began, but he said, tightly, “Yes, I see,” and tried to accelerate, but the 4X4 was spinning in a rut of gravel. They were going nowhere.   
  
A strange, tight calmness settled in her chest just before Neye’s door was yanked open, and a blur of army green muscled in. Alex heard the catch of the gun’s safety being pulled as it was held to Neye’s head. “I’m going to need your car,” the army-green blur said, in French, and it was a woman’s voice.   
  
It was a familiar voice. It was Jeanne, Alex knew it.   
  
Neye twitched toward his own gun, and Jeanne pressed hers against his temple. “Now,” she said. “You’ll never get there in time. I don’t want to hurt you. But I will.”   
  
He raised his hands.   
  
“ _Merci beaucoup_ ,” Jeanne said politely, as though he had just offered her a much-desired cup of tea. “Now move over. I don’t have a lot of time.”   
  
She slammed the door shut, checked the rearview mirror. “ _Shit_ ,” she hissed, and Alex could see that the blue truck was growing larger behind them. She turned to Neye. “Can you shoot?”   
  
“Of course I can shoot,” he said, absurdly sounding a little affronted, and she nodded. “Good.” She put the car in reverse, and suddenly it had traction on the muddy ruts of the former road. They shot forward, then, and Jeanne checked the mirror again. “Goddammit.”   
  
Sophia crossed herself. The truck was in clear view, and Alex could see the people in it – at least four or five of them, and the windows were open, small black muzzles pointing toward them. “Get down, there in back,” Jeanne told them, voice tight. “Get down now.”   
  
Alex slipped off the seat onto her knees and acquainted herself with the dusty carpeting.  She was staring at the zipper of her bag, in close-up, XYZ, end of the alphabet, end of the road, end of it all. Well, if this was the end, at least it was here. At least she wasn’t running away and hiding, at least this would end while she tried to do something useful for someone besides herself. There was a kind of honor in that, so maybe it wasn’t so bad. She could be proud of that. If she’d had any parents left, they would be proud too, she knew, and suddenly she missed them terribly. Against her will, tears sprang into her eyes.   
  
Sophia, beside her, was murmuring prayers when the first bullet hit the back windshield. It didn’t shatter, but she knew it was only a matter of time.   
  
“Steer,” she heard Jeanne tell Neye, and she twisted her head, looked up, and Jeanne had turned out of the car’s window, was shooting from something that sounded at least semiautomatic. Another crackling of distant gunfire, and she could hear bullets thunking off the car, dull and metallic. Neye had the wheel with his left hand, Jeanne standing on the accelerator, and Alex and Sophia were actually bouncing off the floor in the back as the 4X4 struggled to stay in contact with the road. Jeanne’s gun burst out again.   
  
“Ah, fuck it,” Alex heard her mutter over the engine and the bullets, and she yanked on something and threw it. _Was that a fucking grenade?_ Alex registered it just as she felt the blast of the explosion behind them.   
  
“Got ‘em!” Jeanne crowed, then, “Well, got the road, anyway. That’ll slow ‘em down. Keep down until we’re out of range.”   
  
They did.   
  
Soon it was quiet again, although Jeanne was still taking the road at a punishing speed. Neye spent the rest of the trip stealing nervous glances at her. No one said a word.   
  
Just at the outskirts of Bunia, Jeanne said, “Well, this is where I leave. Thanks for letting me hitch a ride.”   
  
Neye blinked at her. “Were they coming for you, or for us?”   
  
“Both, I’d guess,” Jeanne said. “Lucky we were together.”   
  
She jumped out of the car and leaned in the back window, tucking her gun – it looked like a Mac-10, maybe – back under her jacket. “Alex,” she said, smiled. “Good to see you again. As always.”   
  
“Jeanne,” Alex acknowledged, thought: this is absurd. This is absurd. “How’s agroforestry going these days?”   
  
“Mmm, big debate over nitrogen fixing. As you can see,” Jeanne said, “it’s gotten pretty heated.” She winked at Alex, walked into a sidewalk bar, and was gone.   
  
_ “Mon dieu,”  _ Sophia whispered finally.   
  
Back at MONUC, where they had to wait overnight for a flight back to Goma, they heard the news by nightfall, sitting around the canteen, all three of them unwilling to admit to being shaken: someone had blown up a massive cache of weapons and ammunition a few miles from where they’d been. A white woman, maybe. People were saying: American.   
  
Oh, Alex thought, and knew she would never come back to Bunia.   
  
*   
  
She’s surprised to see Jeanne’s name on the conference agenda, giving a presentation apparently entitled “Non-Timber Forest Products for Economic Empowerment of Women in Rural Post-Conflict Communities.” It’s as boring as the rest of them, obviously, but Jeanne does what sounds to her like a pretty credible job of acting like someone who actually understands what she’s talking about. She answers the questions easily, smiles, looks relaxed. All things considered, it’s impressive.   
  
Alex finds her at the coffee break. “Alex!” Jeanne says, leans in to kiss her cheek familiarly. “It’s great to see you.”   
  
“You too,” Alex tells her. “Good talk, too. Are you staying nearby? Maybe we could get a drink later.”   
  
“I can do better than that,” Jeanne says, and smirks. “I’m staying here. 7:30 by the pool?”   
  
*   
  
_ A weapon of war _ , Alex thought, staring at the long rows of beds and the women lying on them, twisted like branches, but despite the UN-approved training curriculum, it almost began to seem after a while that brutal rape was just a fact of life, something that had to be accounted for, a cost of being alive as a woman, and at least you’d made it so far. Which was wrong, she knew, and it was dangerous to start to slip into that, a sense of inevitability. There was nothing inevitable about it, nothing inherent to the Congo that made it a seat of human misery, and certainly none of the atrocities she had seen were not equally capable of happening anywhere else. And she knew, she knew it in her gut, some of the peacekeepers had blood on their hands, too.   
  
She was at the clinic to meet a Congolese rape survivor named Josephine, who had begun, and gotten funding for, a counseling service for women. Josephine had said on the phone that she had a number of women at the clinic who wanted to testify, that some of them could help with the specific prosecution Alex was working on, that she should come to meet them.   
  
The clinic was in an old school building in a small village not far from Kinshasa, and there was a medical section for recent victims, relying on donated surgical services from MSF. And so Alex was there, looking at the women twisted in agony on the beds, but although the place was run-down, it was spotlessly clean. The surgeon was coming around in two days, and relatively speaking, that was a pretty lucky thing.   
  
Josephine continued her tour, showing Alex around the small compound where women who could no longer live in their villages had moved with their children. “Here we have some services,” she said, proudly, and rightly so, Alex thought. “We show them that the shame is not their shame.” There was artwork, even, on some of the walls, because a Spanish art therapist had come for a while, and had trained some of the women to continue it after she left.   
  
The atmosphere was almost hopeful, actually. “What do you think?” Josephine asked her, back in her office and about to begin interviews, and Alex found herself actually smiling. It hurt her cheeks. “I think it’s wonderful,” she told her, and didn’t add: forgive my despair.   
  
*   
  
The pool, with its cocktail bar, is crowded by 7:30. It seems most of the international NGO employees are staying here, at $367 a night, including a small group of Russians who had had lots of questions after Jeanne’s presentation. Alex points them out to Jeanne when she arrives a few minutes late, her hair damp and piled on her head. Fair enough, Alex thinks: long hot showers aren’t so easy to come by.   
  
“Mmm,” Jeanne acknowledges, scanning the crowd. Her hand strays toward her hip.   
  
The gesture is familiar. “You didn’t bring a gun here?” Alex asks.   
  
“Don’t be ridiculous,” Jeanne says, pulls her bottom lip between her teeth. “We’re at the pool. Of course I brought a gun.”   
  
She cocks her head. “You can never be too careful,” she continues, taking a long drag of her gently sweating Primus. “I don’t really trust you, either.”   
  
“You don’t trust me,” Alex repeats. “You say that like I’m the one who got you shot at.”   
  
Jeanne has the grace to look a little sheepish. “Sorry about that,” she says. “I didn’t know you’d be in the area, or I would have tried to hold off another day. But it was a small window of opportunity, you know?”   
  
“No,” Alex says. “I don’t.”   
  
“Well,” Jeanne says, “I had...heard that some pretty bad shit was about to go down. And, you know, it's just harder to shoot people when all your ammo's been blown up.”    
  
“Are you CIA?”   
  
Jeanne shrugs. “You could say that.”    
  
“Well, I could say a lot of things.”   
  
She smirks. “I suppose you could.”   
  
“I need another drink,” Alex says.   
  
*   
  
For the first year or so, the internet was spotty. She did her work on a silly-looking military-spec laptop, built to withstand occupational hazards like falling into water, getting shot with small-arms fire, and being dropped from helicopters. (It didn’t.) When she needed to check email in Kinshasa – and she never did, really, because she saw all of her colleagues in person almost every day – she went to the EXCEL INTERNET CAFÉ, where all of the signs were written in all caps with lots of exclamation points, and it was only a couple of hundred francs for an hour of slow, slow time.   
  
Isolated that way, the outside world faded and shrank, so that her whole life rather quickly became circumscribed to the people she saw every day, the places she went in person: the group house, the office, the patisserie, the little bar where they went for their sundowners; farther afield, the refugee camps, Goma, the villages. She could read headlines about things that happened in other cities, Paris, New York, Hong Kong, whatever, but they didn’t seem like real places anymore, the people in them little more than figments of her imagination. Both the past and the future seemed not only far away, but irrelevant, as though her life had begun and would end here. The shrinking of her life was so complete that she never had much occasion to notice it.   
  
She was in Goma her first December, where Rwanda bled into the country like a sore. The internet was even slower. The fighting in the city had mostly subsided less than a year ago, but the whole place was crawling with agents, spies and assorted hangers-on from at least eight countries and a couple of dozen armed groups, plus all the usual mercenaries and the mining companies’ security consultants, who had the most expensive sunglasses and all the biggest guns. Some worrying, ethnically provocative radio broadcasts had been floating around, sporadically, in the preceding weeks. Everyone was jumpy, and there was a knife-edge of anxiety in the air.   
  
The weather, though, was warm and pleasant as ever. The weather was about the only thing in Goma that didn’t remind her of hell; there was even an active volcano and the constant threat of deadly lake gas to complete the picture. A whole swath of downtown had been buried in a lava flow, and you could go walk on it, see into the windows of buildings that had once held businesses or families. In New York it was probably cold and maybe snowing – she had kind of forgotten what it would be like.   
  
She was typing up the testimony on her tapes, so that the stories could be indexed, each rape cross-referenced to the movements of the troops known to be in the area at the time, each low-voiced accusation properly logged and numbered. It was easier to type while she listened, since the act of typing helped to distract her a little from the words she was setting down.   
  
She wanted to take a walk, try to clear her head, but there was no place to go, and anyway Goma wasn’t the sort of town where you could just have a nice stroll. Bells were ringing, but she didn’t know where the churches were. The dull, clanging resonance hung in the air, repeated, and it was vibrating at about the same frequency as her skull, somehow.   
  
Finally, she turned toward the attendant at the café, a listless young woman, and said, “Why are the bells ringing?”   
  
The girl looked at her strangely. “It’s Christmas,” she said.   
  
Oh, she thought, right, that, but there was all the endless death she had seen, the hollow-eyed women and their voices on her tapes and the clear impossibility of anything that could be done to help, and thinking about it all was making her almost woozy with horror.   
  
She decided to email Olivia, for some reason. She was lonely and discouraged and apparently it was fucking _Christmas_ , of all things, tidings of great joy, so why not. _Hi, Olivia, it’s Alex,_ she started, tried to think of anything normal to say. It was probably best not to get into it too much. In a rush, she typed: _I just wanted to say hi and merry Christmas. Things are harder than I expected here, but I’m doing fine. I hope everything is going well for you._  
  
It wasn’t a very good message, maybe, and it probably wasn't even true, but she didn’t know what else to say. Or how to sign it. “Love” was out, obviously, but “Best regards” and “Sincerely” seemed too formal and stiff, and “Cheers” did nothing to describe her state of mind at all, so she just wrote _Alex,_ a luxury she never took for granted anymore, and hit “send” before she could talk herself out of it.   
  
She waited at the internet café (this one had a teenager with an Uzi on the stoop, watching the street) for several hours, reading the _New York Times_ and trying to pretend she wasn’t hoping for a response. But Olivia never wrote back.   
  
Alex supposed she deserved it.   
  
*   
  
“So you’re still hung up on this woman,” Jeanne says mildly. Her hair hangs over her eyes.   
  
Alex shakes her head, feels her lips pressing together, because it’s not that she doesn’t like talking about it, exactly, it’s that she never knows what to say, still doesn’t really understand how everything went wrong. Besides the obvious, of course: the blood on her teeth, the years in flyover country. But if everything had been real in the first place, none of that should have mattered, really. Wasn’t that how people worked?   
  
“Hung up on – old things, really,” she says, trying not to think about Elliot shaking his head over a pint of Smithwick’s, the lines in his face catching more shadow than she’d remembered, saying _you know, she hasn’t been the same since you left_. Trying not to think about the Olivia she’d returned to, sadder and more fucked up than ever: Olivia, often drunk. Olivia, even more bound up in the self-loathing she’d never managed to explain to herself. Olivia, backing up, hands splayed against the wall, that awful defeated look, the tug at the side of her mouth, her eyes always huge and too bright, the way she moved like a woman trapped in a shell. “I don’t really think it could work out with us anymore, even if.” She leaves the sentence there.   
  
Jeanne nods, staring down at her own hands on the table, fingering her coaster with its soggy ring of condensation, and a warm flush of self-consciousness washes over Alex, suddenly.   
  
“Sorry – I don't know why I'm telling you about all of this –”   
  
Jeanne laughs a little, then. The breeze picks up. “I won’t hold it against you,” she says, nearly grins. “If that’s your big, bad story, you're still doing all right. Anyway. I'm very discreet.”   
  
It’s true, Alex knows, although it’s hardly the whole truth, so help her. Well. She’s hardly the only unhappy contractor traipsing like a moron around Africa, thinking she can run away from herself. “What’s yours, then?” she asks, but Jeanne only looks at her and smiles, and says, “I’ll get us another round.”   
  
Alex shrugs. “All right.” She can tell her voice is maybe a touch louder than usual. Her head already feels a little light. It’s good. It’s good.   
  
Jeanne leans across the table, about to stand. “You have really pretty eyes,” she says. “Sort of…UN blue.”   
  
_ She’s flirting with me _ , Alex realizes suddenly, and she tries to smile back, but the language of affection is a distant memory, and after two years here, the mere thought of innocent desire is beyond her imagining.   
  
Also, it’s been two years since she last shaved her legs.   
  
In the elevator - Jeanne's room is one floor below hers - Jeanne looks over at her, says, "Maybe if I ever get back to New York, I'll give you a call."    
  
"I'd like that," Alex tells her, and almost means it.   
  
The elevator dings. "This is me," Jeanne murmurs. She looks at Alex almost expectantly, then leans in. Her lips are warm and soft on Alex's cheek, lingering a second longer than a friendly good-night kiss should. She backs away, and Alex has a dim, uncomfortable feeling that she ought to be able to read the expression on her face.   
  
She smiles a little, and then she's gone. Only as Alex is sliding the key into her door does she realize that Jeanne assumed the next place they'd see each other would be in New York.   
  
She stalks across the room, peels open the creaky sliding doors to the moonlit cement balcony, fuck the mosquitoes, fuck the Congo, fuck it all, she was an idiot ever to think she could matter here. The night is clear, surprisingly, and the stars are very bright, even here in the city. Not like they are out in the villages, where the whole sky is painted with light when the veil of clouds parts, but bright and sharp, like the steel-tipped points of weapons, like the heavens themselves would like to kill her. She takes a deep, shaky breath.   
  
_ Should I stay or should I go _ , is the question, really, and it occurs to Alex suddenly that she’s been asking herself the same thing for a decade now: stay or go? Here or there? And even with all this practice, even when she knows what the answer has to be, it never seems to get easier.   
  
She wonders whether anyone in New York will be able to see these years on her face. It’s doubtful, really. Most people look the same, no matter what’s happened to them.   
  
She watches the lights blink in the harbor, and she knows.   
  
Alex walks inside and picks up the phone.   
  
“I’ve decided not to renew my contract,” she says when Philippe picks up, because it’s past eleven, so of course he’s in the office. She hears the resignation in the short pause on the other end of the line. “All right,” he says.   
  
“I don’t think,” Alex says, “I just don’t think I can do this anymore.”   
  
“You did good work, Alex.”   
  
“Thanks,” Alex acknowledges, although she doesn’t really believe him.    
  
She only wakes up twice.   
  
*   
  
The next day is cloudy and warm. She goes across the street for an espresso and a croissant, watches the street traffic, the people on their way to work and school, carrying fish to the market, carrying Kalashnikovs to the barracks, the army-green troop trucks and the black Mercedes sedans and the duct-taped bicycles and the tired, dusty feet.    
  
Rattling in the back of the little taxi on her way to the airport, she tries not to think about anything at all, just listens to the bleating of goats on the street corners as they pass, wraps her scarf a little more tightly. (It’s a good security blanket, too.) Eighteen hours from now, she’ll be in New York. It’s never really been all that far away.   
  
In the future, maybe all of this will make sense to her, maybe she’ll be able to place it somewhere in the broken, strange narrative she’s made of her life. Maybe she’ll only remember this place when she has cause to smell burning plastic. Or any time she doesn’t.   
  
It’s raining when the plane takes off. In ten seconds Alex is in low-hanging clouds, nothing but brightening gray around her. She could be anywhere.


End file.
